“Yes.”
“I don’t want to be in this house full of memories, and letters I haven’t answered, and the stupid, stupid things he did.” Her voice was savage. “That stink—it’s the stink of stupidity.”
Isidore nodded.
“My sister, the Dowager Countess of Douglass, keeps an old-fashioned house, perhaps, but it’s the sort that I’m comfortable with. This son of mine, with the way he looks and he acts…I can’t do it anymore. I can’t be here and pretend that I don’t care when traditions are violated, and stupid, stupid men do just as they wish. He runs about the country naked.”
“Not precisely,” Isidore managed.
“They live to humiliate us. Over and over. My husband never trotted about in diapers. But when I think of it now, he might as well have been naked. You may leave now.” She waved her hand.
Isidore backed out of the carriage.
“You’ll find out,” the dowager said. Her gaze was not unkind. “Send my things after me once the maids are able to enter that wretched house. I’ll write Godfrey with my consolations and instructions for his future welfare. You’ll have to cope with the duke’s unkempt ways and his foreignness. God knows I tried but he was never mine. Not really mine.”
Isidore curtsied, the deep, respectful curtsy that one gives to a deposed queen.
The queen didn’t notice.
Chapter Thirty-one
Gore House, Kensington
London Seat of the Duke of Beaumont
March 3, 1784
It was as if the world froze for a moment. He shook Elijah—and Elijah’s head flopped forward, like a poppy on a broken stalk.
“No!” Without even thinking, Villiers shook Elijah again, hard. “Wake up!” Fear suddenly wrenched his gut.
Elijah woke up.
For a moment he stared straight ahead, as if into a country no one else could see. Then his eyes slipped to Villiers and he smiled. “Hello.”
Villiers stumbled backwards, feeling for a chair, and fell into it. “Christ and damnation.”
Elijah’s smile faded.
“What was that?” Villiers said. “What just happened?”
And, when there was no answer: “Elijah!”
They hadn’t used first names with each other since they were both fifteen, sixteen…whenever that was that they quarreled over a lass and never spoke again.
“I collapsed,” Elijah said bluntly. “I must have fainted. It’s my heart. I’m thirty-four.”
“Thirty-four?” Villiers shook his head. “Thirty-four? What’s that, a terminal date for hearts?”
“My father died at thirty-four,” Elijah said, putting his head back on the chair and looking up at the ceiling. “His heart failed him. I had hopes of surpassing his span, but I have, increasingly, these small episodes. I see no reason to fool myself.”
“Oh, God.”
“Not quite yet,” he said, that beautiful half-smile of his quirking the corner of his mouth. He shook his head. “There’s nothing more to say about it all, Leo.”
Villiers hated being called Leopold. He hated being anything other than Villiers, and he never was, to anyone other than Elijah. The very sound of the name made him feel unbalanced, as if nearly twenty years had vanished.
“I don’t accept that,” he said. The words felt harsh in his throat. “Have you seen a doctor?”
Elijah shrugged. “There’s no need.”
“You blacked out.”